IBM PureData Brings New Analytics Platform

IBM finally has started to expand its PureSystems family of systems with the introduction of the PureData System. The system promises to let organizations more efficiently manage and quickly analyze petabytes of data and then intelligently apply those insights in addressing business issues across their organization.

This is not a surprise. From the start, IBM talked about a family of PureSystems beyond the initial PureFlex and PureApplications. When the PureSystems family was introduced last spring, DancingDinosaur expected IBM to quickly add new expert servers starting with something it guessed would be called PureAnalytics and maybe another called PureTransactions. PureData isn’t that far off. The new systems are being optimized specifically for transactional operations and data analytics workloads.

Specifically, PureData System for Transactions has been integrated and optimized as a ready-to-run database platform designed and tuned specifically for transactional data workloads. It supports both DB2 applications unchanged and Oracle database applications with only minimal changes. The machines come as three workload-specific models optimized either for transactional, operational, and big data analytics. They are:

PureData System for Transactions: Aimed at retail and credit card processing environments that depend on rapid handling of transactions and interactions these transactions may be small, but the volume and frequency require fast and efficient processing. The new system provides hardware and software configurations integrated and optimized for flexibility, integrity, availability and scalability for any transaction workload.

PureData System for Analytics: Enables organizations to quickly and easily analyze and explore big data, up to multi petabytes in volume. The new system simplifies and optimizes performance of data warehouse services and analytics applications. Powered by Netezza technology (in-memory analytics), the new system aims to accelerate analytics and boasts what IBM describes as the largest library of in-database analytic functions on the market today. Organizations can use it to predict and avoid customer churn in seconds, create targeted advertising and promotions using predictive and spatial analysis, and prevent fraud.

PureData System for Operational Analytics: Here organizations can receive actionable insights concurrently on more than 1,000 business operations to support real-time decision making. Operational warehouse systems are used for fraud detection during credit card processing, to deliver customer insights to call center operations (while the customer is still on the call or online), and track and predict real-time changes in supply and demand.

IBM hasn’t disclosed pricing, which is highly subject to the particular configuration anyway. However, the company is quick to tout its introductory deals: Credit-qualified clients that elect IBM financing can see immediate benefits with PureData System by deferring their first payment until January 2013 or obtaininga zero percent (interest-free) loan for 12, 24 or 36 months.

PureData may be better thought of as a data appliance delivering data services fed by applications that generate the data and reside elsewhere. With its factory built-in expertise, patterns, and appliance nature organizations can have, according to IBM, a PureData system up and running in hours, not days or weeks; run complex analytics in minutes, not hours; and handle more than 100 databases on a single system. PureData can be deployed in one step simply by specifying the cluster name, description, and applicable topology pattern. Built-in expertise handles the rest.

Now the game is to guess what the next PureSystems expert server will be. DancingDinosaur’s guess: a highly scalable implementation of VDI, maybe called PureDesktop.